Alice keeps a food diary detailing every morsel that passes her lips. She is not on a diet, she says, but is “cutting down” on food because she wants to lose some weight from her stomach and thighs. She rarely has more than an apple for breakfast and for months her lunch has consisted of a diet cola drink and a Kit Kat.
“Until last year I’d never thought that I might get fat but I noticed that my tummy was getting flabby, so I stopped eating as much,” she says. “I worry that I already have chunky legs and I don’t want to end up putting on weight like my sister. I write down my calories and if I get hungry I nibble on things like grapes at home.
“I’m starving by the time we have our evening meal and I usually eat it all — but I’m not going to pig out all day. I would just hate to be fat.”
Alice is 13, and she is far from alone in her attitude to eating. Her food avoidance tactics and body-consciousness are quite normal among children of her age — a generation who are growing up accustomed to feeling hungry.
With their erratic and disordered eating patterns, these “progressive food restrictors” occupy the middle ground on a scale from obesity down to eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia nervosa. Gradually, and often secretly, they reduce their food intake with the aim of squeezing into the skinniest jeans in Topshop.
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A few may eventually develop clinical eating problems, but experts say that most girls who rigorously control their diet from a young age are simply setting themselves up to be burdened by the dieting culture and its knock-on destruction of selfesteem for life.
Teenage body issues are nothing new, of course. Girls, especially, have always aspired to slimness and gone to various lengths to achieve it. What has changed is the increased extent to which young people think and worry about diet and weight. Andrew Hill, professor of medical psychology at the University of Leeds and an expert in adolescent dieting and body image, says it is inevitable that teenagers today have a more acute sense of weight and body shape than their older female relatives had at the same age. Their mothers are likely to have grown up in the 1980s, the decade in which diet books mushroomed and the concept of gyms and fitness emporia promising to sculpt their patrons’ bodies into perfect shape became part of the public consciousness.
“A generation on, teenagers are further encultured in dieting and body-image issues,” says Professor Hill. “They are growing up in an environment where it is considered almost normal to exclude food and to pursue what has been billed as the perfect body shape. Regulating their food intake is socially sanctioned — and even sanctioned by health promoters to some extent.”
Various recent findings illustrate the rising concern with appearance that plagues adolescents. Last week, a Girlguiding UK study suggested that body dissatisfaction starts at about the age of 10, with 12 per cent of the under-12s surveyed wanting to be thinner. Half of the 11 to 16-year-old girls in the survey, and 66 per cent of 16 to 21-year-olds, had cut down on their food intake — and 12 per cent would consider cosmetic surgery to achieve the look that they wanted.
Those results came soon after a survey of 32,000 10 to 15-year-olds by the Schools Health Education Unit revealed that teenage girls routinely skip up to two meals a day. Breakfast is the most common meal forfeited (26 per cent of 14 and 15-year-olds start the day on an empty stomach), but 22 per cent miss lunch and one in ten eats just one meal each day.
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I know a 12-year-old girl whose mother despairs when she insists on eating only porridge for breakfast and lunch. A teacher friend reports that more and more girls are nibbling next to nothing at lunchtime. “They say they are not hungry,” she says, “but how can that be the case when they left home at 8.30am, probably on an empty stomach?”
Revealing the causes of this shift towards a dieting obsession is far from straightforward. Dee Dawson, director of the Rhodes Farm Clinic in North London, argues that the trend has been exacerbated by food fears and society’s increased focus on childhood obesity, which can leave non-overweight youngsters stressed about their bodies. Add to that the rise in scares about food additives and contamination, the escalating number of food allergies and intolerances and the popular, widely publicised diets of celebrities that often involve cutting out entire food groups, and it is little wonder that young people should accept the idea of excluding certain foods most of the time.
“Once you start to categorise foods as good or bad, then confusion about what to eat is bound to arise,” Dawson says. “That can lead to a paranoia that exhibits itself as disordered or restricted eating in children.”
Not everyone thinks that external pressures are exclusively to blame, though. This year, an American study by the National Institutes of Health suggested that the brains of teenage girls are pre-programmed to seek the approval of their peers when it comes to attractiveness — meaning that, for some at least, weight loss may simply be the result of an innate cry for attention. But others are certain that the “hungry generation” has been created by factors that could be controlled. Last month, in a survey of more than 500 girls by the teen magazine Sugar, 61 per cent of respondents admitted worrying that they were overweight. A crucial factor in their unhappiness, it seems, was their own mother’s attitude to weight and food: 59 per cent of the 12 to 18-year-old girls whose mothers had dieted were likely to do so themselves.
Annabel Brog, the editor of Sugar, says that the inspiration to survey her young readers came from her own teenage experiences with a super-slim mother who would hand out weight-related compliments, giving her daughter hang-ups about her body that have persisted into adulthood. “The home life of young girls, and the influence of their mothers in particular, has been ignored when it comes to body-image problems,” says Brog, who is now a mother herself. “It is far easier to blame society in general, skinny models or the media for eating issues when often the root cause of a bad relationship with food is much closer to home.”
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Lindsay, a 13-year-old girl from Durham, described how she accompanies her mother to a slimming club because there is no one at home to look after her. “I sit outside and look at all these people talking about food and hating their shape. I feel that I should start dieting now before I get like that.”
Her feelings demonstrate how a “drip effect” of continual self-criticism about weight and looks by older females in the family will eventually rub off on easily influenced teenagers.
“Mothers and sisters can have a negative influence if they talk about weight and diet all the time,” says Amanda Hills, a psychologist who specialises in body-image disorders. “For a lot of the young people I treat, food also becomes an issue when Mum isn’t sitting down to dinner with everyone else, or is off preparing a separate meal — or eating nothing.”
Family mealtimes could be the key to preventing teenage girls from developing eating disorders, a study published last year in the Archives of Paediatrics and Adolescent Medicine suggests. Of 2,500 girls, those who ate five or more meals with their family each week had a much healthier relationship with food later in life.
In some ways, says Professor Hill, home life can influence attitudes to food for good or ill. But even parents and siblings with the healthiest of body images cannot shield teenage girls completely from cultural influences on how they feel about themselves. The unprecedented thirst for celebrity has led to an unrealistic expectation of bodily perfection, even if the images that feed it are created with an airbrush.
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Girls’ perceptions of what is normal and attainable have shifted beyond recognition in the past 20 years. “Studies have confirmed that girls aged 12 to 14 are still most strongly influenced by schoolfriends of the same age,” says Professor Hill. “The playground is an incredibly strong environment when it comes to forming their views and opinions. It has become almost impossible for girls to extract themselves from some negativity towards their bodies and food.”
What the future holds for the hungry generation is unclear. There are fears, founded on research, that years of undereating will predispose girls to chronic nutritional deficiencies and an epidemic of related conditions such as the bone-thinning disease osteoporosis.
Professor Hill says that some teenagers will renegotiate their relationship with food as they get older. But for many, underlying issues are likely to remain. “Marginalising food intake is viewed as an admirable display of self-control and willpower,” he says. “Eating one meal a day has become a goal to which girls aspire. If food is considered something to control or avoid, it is likely that someone will have a difficult relationship with it for life.”